The Sultan Of Sloth passing judgement on the Sultan Of Surly? Jason Giambi crediting his AL Comeback Player Of The Year Award on….being an admitted steroid user? The above revelations from the Hartford Courant’s Don Amore and David Heukschel.
A year ago, Jason Giambi was signing autographs in Fort Myers, where Red Sox fans were expected to give him a going-over.
An elderly man in Red Sox garb got close enough for Giambi to hear and shouted, “Barry Bonds should be doing what you’re doing.”
As another chapter of the steroids controversy unfolds around Bonds, Giambi is questioned as an observer. By admitting and apologizing for unspecified mistakes, Giambi took himself from the eye of the steroids storm and began rehabilitating his image.
“I got an award for it,” Giambi said Wednesday, referring to his selection as AL comeback player of the year last season, as voted by the fans.
But he added, “It was a different situation. I just did what I felt I had to do. I don’t want to speak for anyone else.”
Meanwhile, Red Sox pitcher David Wells, a good friend of Giambi’s, urged Bonds to go the same route.
“Be a man and come out and say that he did [use steroids],” Wells said in an interview in Fort Myers. “Don’t hide behind the uniform. Don’t hide behind the players association. If you’re guilty and you got caught, come clean. I think he’d get a lot more respect from people than lying.”
At the risk of beating a dead horse, Giambi “did what he had to do” after he’d testified in front of a grand jury and the results became public knowledge.
I’ve read the excepts from ‘Game Of Shadows’ this evening in the latest Sports Illustrated, and Barry Bonds certainly comes off like a creep (big surprise). But I couldn’t help but wonder during the portions of the article that detailed Barry’s amazing physical transformation after the age of 35, what we’d eventually learn about other players’ training methods if they were subject to this kind of exhaustive investigation.
And on a completely unrelated subject, I bet Roger Clemens is in terrific shape tomorrow against South Africa.
I second your thoughts on the SI excerpt. Also, did they have to use that insinuating, over-dramatic tone throughout? If there evidence is so extensive (and I’m actually not really doubting that it is), can’t they ‘let it speak for itself’, as it were?
It was a book excerpt, not a regular cover story. Understand the difference? The presupposition is that Bonds is guilty of using illegal steroids, so why wouldn’t it be appropriate to use an insinuating tone? And I don’t know about over-dramatic. It was pretty cut-and-dried. To me it felt more like a very precise cataloging of minutiae related to his process of usage, but then again I was sober when I read it.
Read like very solid reporting to me, though the Kimberly Bell stuff was a little Donny Deutschbag style (ie. we’ve heard it before and Barry being a worse boyfriend than Tom Sizemore doesn’t cut to the heart of the issue). But I guess that’s the (in)human element needed to villify Barry. I mean, the Babe had zipper problems, too.
The postscript by Tom Verducci, while well-read, felt uneccessary. The earlier findings are damining enough as is…and not just of Barry, of the Giants, too (Peter Magowan doesn’t exactly come off like a guardian of the game’s integrity through all of this). If we’re going to get into a bigger back-and-forth about Barry’s place in history, what-does-Bud-do, etc., fair ’nuff, but I do think Barry’s an easy scapegoat. He’s not the only cheat, only the most prolific and most arrogant.
Steve Finley, was moaning on the TV this morning about how crummy it was to see such a book launched right at the start of the WBC. If Finley (who doesn’t seem to be on the Team USA roster somehow) knew anything about the publishing biz, he’d realize it is VERY hard to schedule a tome’s publication date around the time Barry passes Babe Ruth.